it is taken for granted that mine labour also involves anti-social hours, with shifts starting at 05:30 or 21:00 and Saturday-working being a requirement. A group of wives that I spoke with agreed in chorus that their husbands always returned home exhausted. My sense is that today’s Lonmin workers often slave for more hours a week than the 1920s colliery workers I studied, and they probably work harder.2
What does a worker get paid for such hazardous and strenuous work? With few exceptions, those we spoke to said they received between R4,000 and R5,000 per month. These were ‘take home’ figures, and included, so we were told, a standard housing, or ‘living out’, allowance.3Figures vary and calculations are affected by exchange rates, but miners in Australia and the UK can expect to earn about ten times this amount. Workers complained that bonuses and overtime payments were negligible. General assistants claimed they received under R4,000 and a supervisor said he received a little more than R5,000. Such money goes quickly. Many of the workers were oscillating migrants with one family in the rural area and another in Marikana. Inevitably this entailed added costs, especially if the ‘wives’ were unemployed, which was common.4Major expenditure includes rent for a shack (about R450), food (with prices rising rapidly), school and medical expenses, and interest on loans.5Inequality accompanying low pay provides added anguish. For instance, Mineworker 4 observed: ‘You will hear that stocks are up, but we get nothing’. Highlighting the continuing salience of ‘race’, he added: ‘The white people reprimand us if we do not do our work properly or make a mistake. It would have been better to be reprimanded knowing that we were getting pay’.
Several workers had long-standing gripes about their union, NUM, for its failure to support them over critical issues, such as safety and pay. Mineworker 8 claimed that ‘NUM, truly speaking, it always sides with the employer.’ He added: ‘When a person gets hurt here underground, the employer and NUM change the story. They say: “that person got hurt in his shack”.’ Another worker, Mineworker 4, complained: ‘We have been struggling while the union leaders were comfortable, drinking tea. When they have a problem, the management helps them quickly. Even their cellphones are always loaded with airtime, R700, R800’.
Matters came to a head at the end of May 2011, following NUM’s suspension of its popular branch chairperson at Karee, one of Lonmin’s three mines at Marikana. Mineworker 8 provides an account of events. According to him, members ‘loved’ the chairperson, Steve, because he refused to take bribes from management and ‘he always came with straight things... things that NUM never wanted us to know’.6The suspension followed a dispute about a payout from a trust fund established to enable workers to benefit from profits made over the preceding five years. The workers responded to Steve’s suspension by engaging in an unprotected strike. NUM did not support their action, and Lonmin sacked the entire Karee labour force, about 9,000 workers.7Whilst this was a set-back for the workers, nearly all of them were rehired. Because they were ‘re-hired’ rather than ‘re-instated’, workers had to join the union anew. Understandably, few requested membership of NUM, so, significantly (and ironically), the union lost its base at Karee.
According to Mineworker 8, for the next three months ‘the situation was bad’. He then explained: ‘It was very bad because if you do not have a union the employer can do whatever he likes to you’. Nevertheless, workers continued to meet in a semi-clandestine manner, with individuals anonymously convening meetings by pinning a ‘paper’ on a notice board. Even though NUM had been discredited, some workers considered bringing it back, believing that any union would be better than none. However, the majority were opposed to this scenario, and it was at this point that most of the Karee workers went over to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). By early 2012, AMCU had gained representation rights at Karee, had won some support at Eastern Mine and had a few people at Western Mine.8AMCU’s presence at Marikana is, then, a recent phenomenon, and, as with the union’s formation back in 2001, the catalyst was NUM’s suspension of a popular leader.9
By July 2012 there was widespread dissatisfaction over pay.10This was particularly acute among RDOs at Karee Mine, who complained that, since they had to work without an assistant (unlike their counterparts at Eastern and Western), they were doing two jobs, and should be remunerated accordingly. The implication was that their pay should be raised from about R4,000 per month, to about R7,500.11Following a mass protest at Karee on 1 August, the manager there awarded his RDOs a bonus of R750 per month.12Elsewhere, RDOs working with an assistant received an extra R500 and assistants got an additional R250. Now, nobody was happy. The Karee men still felt underpaid and RDOs on other mines wanted the same higher increase.13To add to the mix, the Karee RDOs had secured a partial victory without involving NUM, thus boosting their confidence while antagonising the NUM leadership. With RDOs now protesting at different shafts, management took the view that their demands should be presented to central Lonmin structures rather than handled locally.14This provided added stimulus to co-ordinated action, and by 6 August representatives from across the company had established an informal committee. This body then convened a meeting for all Lonmin RDOs.
The strike starts
The assembly took place on Thursday 9 August, Women’s Day, a public holiday, at Wonderkop Stadium (see Map 2). At a rally held two days after the massacre, one of the leaders, Tholakele Dlunga (known as Bhele) narrated as follows: ‘For those of you who do not know, this started on the ninth, when workers of Lonmin gathered to try and address the issue of wage dissatisfaction... to try get our heads together and find a way forward.’15Various demands were being raised, and it was agreed that there should be a common proposal for R12,500 per month.16 However, the objective was to secure a decent increase, and the specific figure was seen as a negotiating position. Mineworker 1 expressed himself thus: ‘Yes, we demanded 12.5 but we... only wanted to talk. We wanted management to negotiate that maybe at the end we will get around 8.9’. NUM was not advancing workers’ claims for better remuneration, and the big problem was getting Lonmin to talk directly with the workers. For Mineworker 1 the thinking was: ‘We will go to the employer on our own and ask for that money... we will go to the employer ourselves because the work we do there is very hard and is killing us.’ The practical conclusion was that workers would deliver their demand to the management the following day.
The meeting brought together workers from across Marikana and it elected a committee that reflected the diversity of the workforce. According to one source, the original committee included two workers from the Western shafts, three from the Eastern shafts and three from those in Karee.17NUM was still the dominant force in Western and Eastern while AMCU prevailed in Karee, but union affiliation was not the issue. Another worker recalled that the committee was ‘representative of all cultural constituencies. It had to be made up of people coming from different provinces’.18Women were not represented, however. According to Mineworker 7, a woman, this was because they were more vulnerable to victimisation by the employer—because there were fewer of them, so more obvious. Responding to the question ‘If they were not afraid they would have been elected?’ she said: ‘They would have been nicely elected’.19Later on, the committee was expanded, and included people who had responsibility for organising the funerals and for welcoming and providing information for visitors.20Significantly, a key responsibility of the original committee was, as Mineworker 3 put it, its ability to maintain ‘peace and order’. He argued: ‘[In] other strikes, people mess up and damage stores and beat people, things like that. So those people [the committee] were able to control people.’ Mineworker 1 added that, in electing the committee, workers ‘wanted to make sure there was order’. In light of subsequent events, this commitment to peace and order, embodied in the leadership of the strike, is highly pertinent. As we will see, the workers were prepared to defend themselves, but they did not initiate violence.
The main decision of the meeting was that the following day, 10 August, the RDOs would strike. At this stage other employees were expected to work normally, though, in reality, without the RDOs, at least according to Mineworker 8, production would be minimal.21The strikers marched to the offices of Lonmin’s local senior management, located at the so-called ‘LPD’ (Lonmin Platinum Division). They were met by a white security officer who said the managers
